Casper Banjo (1937 – 2008) An Appreciation

Art Hazelwood

Casper Banjo, born in Memphis in 1937, died tragically in Oakland, California,
his long time home, on March 14, 2008. The outlines of the story of Casper’s
death were widely reported in local media. He was shot to death by a police
rifleman at the shopping mall near his house. The police say that he was
holding what turned out to be a replica gun. The details of his death may never
be known.

At the very time of his death the print dealer Lee Stone as well as the curator
of prints from the Library of Congress, Katherine Blood, were expressing
interest in his work. Since then the Library has acquired three of his prints,
an etching portrait of the artist’s mother, a lithograph and a mixed media
print including Casper’s trademark brick imagery. M. Lee Stone Fine Prints is
now representing the estate of Casper Banjo.

Though he was active in the art world, Casper lived quietly in an apartment in
Oakland and arranged his life around his artwork. He did the majority of his
work there, printing by hand, without any press, his elaborate embossed prints
and mixed media work.

From his earliest prints Casper focused on texture in his artwork. Most
famously he was obsessed with bricks. Once in a casual remark I said to Casper
that his brick walls were about what was behind the wall. Casper’s categorical
and determined reply was, “There you go.”

And I believe that is the key to understanding both Casper’s art and his life.
The drama of his work and his life is the brick wall. The wall of bricks
represents Casper the immovable, singular in vision and determination. It
represents Casper the stoic philosopher, unmoved by passing fancies, and
willing to point out injustice where he saw it.

And Casper’s brick wall was visionary. He took the most concrete of forms, a
form that met him at his earliest childhood; the brick wall in Memphis, in St.
Louis and in Oakland. He saw brick walls everywhere. And Casper, through his
art, slowly and with determination went through that brick wall. He created a
visual language of transcendence through that brick wall. The great wall, the
great barrier, that Casper felt profoundly was a personal wall, but it was also
an historical wall and a social wall. It was the wall of racism. It was the
wall of prejudice against disability. It was the wall of personal relations.
And ultimately, it was the wall of mortality.

Casper took all that he felt and put it into those walls, those bricks. And it
is a curious bit of art historical reference too. Casper took this concrete
form, and made it abstract. It’s almost as if he was playing some art
historical joke; abstract concrete, abstract bricks.

His bricks were brick, but he studied them till they fell apart. Casper did for
bricks what Mondrian did for trees. Casper made an art that was at once
abstract and concrete, that was at once naïf and profound, that was at once
rooted in his life experiences and referring to the artistic debates of the
twentieth century.

But in addition to his brick patterns Casper explored textures in other ways.
He constantly cut up old prints and then reworked them as collages in later
works. All of his work fed back into whatever was his newest works. And he had
print elements in all his work. In order to create his bricks he often would
build up a plate out of duct tape, mat board and acrylic paint. Then laying a
dampened sheet of etching paper over the plate he used an every day metal spoon
to work the image and emboss the paper. Sometimes these were blank embossing
and sometimes he added fresh layers of acrylic paint on his plate as he
embossed to create colors.

Often the element of chance was used in the process of his work to suggest an
image. Sometimes the acrylic paint transferred in this way would suggest an
image that he would develop further with all manner of drawing, collaging and
embossing.

His graphite drawings progressed in a similar way; utilizing chance to create a
suggestion. He tore up heavy paper randomly and threw it down on the table,
then he placed a fresh sheet of paper over it and by rubbing with the side of a
graphite stick brought out the random shapes of the paper underneath. Then he
turned the paper, and turned it again, adding drawing and erasing as he went.
Most of his graphite drawings in this manner are square in format for the
reason that he wanted to be able to turn it any direction and lose himself in
the work.

Casper was an assistant teacher after obtaining an AA degree at Laney College
in Oakland. He also received BFA ‘73 and MFA ’75 degrees from the San Francisco
Art Institute. His artwork was featured in several publications including Black
Artists on Art, Vol., 2 co-authored by Dr. Semella S. Lewis and Ruth G. Waddy,
Los Angeles, CA; Extraordinary Art, Beyond the Museum II, Philadelphia, PA; The
National Carroll Simms Black Art Catalog, African American Museum, Dallas, TX,
and The International Review of African American Art, Vol., 17, Juliett Harris
editor.

Some of the exhibitions he was most proud of include, Impressions/Expressions:
Black American graphics, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and traveling from 1979 -
1981. Aesthetics of Graffiti, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1978. As well
as a traveling exhibition put on by the Smithsonian Museum in the early 1970s
called Black American Graphics.

Casper was an accomplished and sought after exhibition installer. He worked for
years putting together shows at Oakland’s Center for Visual Arts. He helped San
Francisco’s Coalition on Homelessness by teaching printmaking to homeless
artists, by contributing artwork to the Street Sheet and by installing the
annual art auctions. He helped the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame create prints
of the hands of famous Black filmmakers. He was the master printer behind the
hand stamps of everyone from Paul Robeson to Sammy Davis Jr.